Bringing Down the Barriers in Education

What is the education scenario with in the country today?
In the next decade, India plans to introduce 100 million people in the workforce. But today, the biggest challenge lies in educating the children is to make them fit for main stream employability. Currently, India has 435 million students that need to be educated; but probably only half of them are able to receive a decent education. This is due to the disparity in infrastructure. At one end, you can see a city with 10-15 schools where several thousands of kids are enrolled while in villages there might be one school for 10-15 villages. The distribution of resources is a critical factor here. The easiest way to do this is to set up a $500 PC in a school with all the content aggregated and have a roving faculty, which has to monitor and help them at Pengala, we want to be a stepping stone to achieve this.

How does Pengala solution work?
The Pengala Learning System improves learning by combining the best elements of classroom and self-study, delivered in a way that students study at their own pace and schedule. The new system enables students to get access to great teachers, full video lectures, engagement, tutor interactivity, assessments, personalized feedback, and peer learning. The solution is designed to work on any PC at home or in a shared computer lab with or without broadband Internet access. The product takes a platform approach that helps partners securely distribute courseware and scale their business while making it easy for students to learn.

The company has already forged partnerships with four of the country’s renowned education groups; Pearson Education (formerly Edurite), Brilliant Tutorials, FutureVISTA and Akash institute who will leverage their content/courseware on the Pengala platform. With this, the company hopes to target a wide audience including school students in 6-12 classes and those taking Test Preps and K12 classes.

How does Pengala stand apart from competition?
Pengala’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it addresses the infrastructure gap. Most digital learning solutions are web based that require high speed broadband connectivity. This is rather a challenge once you move out of cities since the speed gets lower and requires a long buffer time. As a result the value of the solution gets dissolved. Students need rich media to learn and not just a monotonous video/study material. At Pengala, we have pop quizzes in between a course to ensure that the student is following the content. Apart from that, we have a large online community where in a student can post his queries and get response from the best in the respective field.